I’ve written a three-part series about [the great Reboot 9.0 conference I attended in Copenhagen](http://reboot.dk) a couple of months ago for [bub.blicio.us](http://bub.blicio.us). bub.blicio.us? From [their about page](http://bub.blicio.us/?page_id=2):

> bub.blicio.us is here to help capture the excitement behind everything two point oh – especially the party and event scenes in Silicon Valley and San Francisco. No panels, no keynotes, no tradeshows, just a lens into the social scene that’s energizing and shaping Bubble 2.0 and the new Valley economy behind it.

> Keep us on your party list. Let us know about your events. Send us the things we just won’t see on upcoming.org. We might just send someone out there to cover the soiree.

So, now that all the articles are online — full of photos! photos, photos, more photos! — let me point you to them:

– [Reboot Part I – Even Europe is bub.blicio.us](http://bub.blicio.us/?p=201)
– [Reboot Part II](http://bub.blicio.us/?p=226)
– [Reboot9 Part III](http://bub.blicio.us/?p=294)

As a reminder (so that this can serve as a general wrap-up post), I also did my best to liveblog most of the sessions I attended:

Actually, the concept goes back quite a while. Twitter made it visible to us, but it actually even predates the internet. Text messaging. Ongoing background awareness of others.

Easier now to broadcast/communicate with a larger network. On Facebook, teens regularly communicate with about a dozen or so contacts, though they have 100-150 “friends”.

Dunbar, etc.

Seeing your teacher in a shop. Weird! The teacher doesn’t count in your monkeysphere if you see her in the classroom only, because she remains one-dimensional. Basically, seeing people outside “context” makes you see them in a different light.

“Intimacy” better than “co-presence”, because this is about human relationships and supporting them.

The village green. (*steph-note: third places*)

Leisa lives in a neighbourhood where people know each other.

Being careful how we represent ourselves online. When I twitter something, it can be googled later. A great way to shape the way that others see you online.

Are these people **really** friends, then? We need to make a judgement about how authentically people are representing themselves online. => taxonomy of relationships.

Phatic expressiveness for virtual spaces. 140 characters is fine for that. People who complain about lack of content are completely missing the point about Twitter. Phatic expression: sole function is to perform a social task. (*steph-note: “we are in contact!” or verbal lice picking…)

David Weinberger: “continual partial friendship”
Johnnie Moore: “it’s not about being poked and prodded, it’s about exposing more surface area for others to connect with.”

Twitter: love it, or hate it. We who love it think that people who don’t like it, don’t get it. It’s a bit patronising. There are quite enough people who *do* get it but don’t like it.

E.g. Kathy Sierra: is it false connectedness?

If we’re not careful, we can trick our brain into thinking we’re having real social interaction. (*steph-note: didn’t get who said that.*)

We’re craving attraction, cf. Generation Me, chapter 4.

For Leisa, these online social interactions are not the social equivalent of junk food.

Ambient intimacy is not a **replacement** for real-life interaction.

Atmospheric communication.

Writing and receiving communications which are not intended to receive full attention.

Leisa doesn’t feel like IM/Twitter etc. prevent her from doing whatever she is doing. The interruptions are stressful according to Kathy Sierra, and prevents one from reaching the state of flow.

David Weinberger: it helps that the volume of flow information is so high that there is no expectation that it is all followed. “Hey dude, I twittered it two days ago!” is not a valid excuse today.

If it bugs you, distracts you, well, shut it down for a while. Is that too simple?

*[Talk stuff is be on Ewan’s blog.](http://edu.blogs.com/edublogs/2007/06/reboot9_citizen.html)*

Technology is everywhere but is not necessarily the main thing in everybody’s life.

Have schools and workplaces adapted to the digital natives? 2007: 16-year-olds born at the same time as the web.

Let’s see what some of these kids are capable of. Cup-stacking video. The daughter just broke the world record for cup stacking and the mother in the background doesn’t react. She doesn’t have a clue.

We’re not letting young ones import their passions in the workplace (school/work).

Headteachers’ reactions when they see that: useless, waste of time. But hey, this is what they spend their time at! Do we take advantage of this kind of thing?

Harnessing kids’ creativity. What do we do with it before it’s stomped out by corporations?

Five points are key (we might not get through them all).

1. Audience

Kids are used to having huge audiences. 19th century classroom, the average audience for a piece of work is 1, or maybe 30 if the work was put up in the classroom.

In the 20th century classroom (with the printing press)… to the one-click web — a 7-year-old making his first edit on wikipedia. Audience: 1’114’274’426

In Ewan’s school, nearly a third of teachers blog about once a week.

Question: what does this audience mean?

The kids are acting local. They publish for their classmates. And when they get a comment from somewhere else, they turn their interest to that country.

Golden eagle animation: why we shouldn’t steal eggs from nests.

2. Unleashing creativity

Kids are very creative. But we never see it. (steph-note: I know where it goes… in “pranks” and “misbehaviour” often — some of the stuff they do is actually really neat if you forget the moral judgement).

Where the use case matters, people will make it work, no matter how crappy the system is. Inspired by [Sugata Mitra’s “hole in the wall” presentation at LIFT](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/02/08/sugata-mitra-outdoctrination-hole-in-the-wall/). “Life will find a way.”

About a town called Kozarac in northern Bosnia. Returnees to a town from which they had been chased. One of two towns in Bosnia which was inhabited almost only by one ethnic group.

Challenges:

– town destroyed, people imprisoned, thousands killed and others expelled
– perpetrators stay in power, and control local authority, and don’t want the inhabitants back
– need to go back and rebuild from scratch

How can an online community support real community (protect, develop…)

For a period of town, the websites were the town. The town only existed in virtual space.

Online space shows high degree of consensus. All discussing the same issues.

Top forum topics: #1, taking the piss out of their own leaders; #2, fire engines.

Practical outcomes? Fire engines: bootstrapping their town, had no support, and were actually opposed. Funded stuff themselves, expat communities contribute through the forums. Fire engines were one of the first priorities. Funded and organised the fire brigade with the help of the diaspora on the forums.

Memorialisation campaigns. Basketball. Identity in the diaspora. We know people in the diaspora tend to become more “old-fashioned” or radical in their national identity. The website allows young people to access the “real” town, and know what’s going on there. Keeps the diaspora connected.

Emin, traumatised survivor, was able to open up about it through the site that he discovered recently.

Bridging can also be physical, structural holes in the physical world. Preservation of memories and culture, specially in a context where teachers, doctors, etc have been targeted for execution. Some people from the town are dead, and nothing exists or remains of them besides what is said or put online about them.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

Lessons?

– scale: small intimate spaces can have a huge effect, more effective at supporting collective action (would this happen on MySpace? no)
– common purpose: if people share a need, they are more co-operative
– hooks into RL
– motivation: real needs => positive behaviour

Is media a unique place to interrupt? How about interruptions in conversations? Linda Stone anecdote with crackberries: checking e-mail all the time, then want to go to the bedroom and have sex immediately. (Their wives’ points of view: not really.)

Traditional media is funded by a mixture of models. The mainstream media is starting to acknowledge the conversation (cf. Time’s person of the year.)

*steph-note: je décroche… and some code-switching in there while we’re at it.*

Service marketing: if the service itself is interesting, people will talk about it. If possible, make your product or service distributable (open distribution).

Stowe’s happy to be back (“reboot was the best single thing I did last year”).

We’re hearing the word “flow” a lot during this conference, used in many different ways. It’s a term that is being stretched in many different ways. Complementary, or not?

Today: flow as a new kind of consciousness. Complementary to yesterday’s “flow” in the first conference.

Apology: because of blogging, Stowe doesn’t write/talk anymore in a very constructed way (“this is my thesis and here are the arguments”) — so lots of fragmentary and incomplete thinking. Incompleteness: the new rhetoric?

Human? “We make our tools and they shape us.” *steph-note: cf. Stowe’s talk at last year’s Shift conference. Other note: Thomas is having to drag the Blimp off stage…* Cycles.

We’re going towards a new kind of consciousness, which will not clear up the problems we have, but we’re going to change. How are we changing? How are brains changing based on the tools we use to understand the world? What are we losing, what do we gain? How will sociality change based on using new tools that shape cultures?

There is a new consciousness evolving, different enough that it’s going to cause trouble, that a lot of people are going to say it’s bad, and that the people participating in it are doing something illegitimate. (Finger-wagging.) Developing a new moral sense: valuing certain things more highly, and certain things less highly. Hive-mind? Sniffing each other’s pheromones all day?

Will take what the naysayers are saying, and debunk their arguments.

**The juggler’s paradox**

A small number of “true” jugglers in the room. To learn to juggle, simply do it. The ball falls, and you try again. You train your neurons to do something you didn’t know how to do before. The way jugglers describe what they’re doing doesn’t help other people learn it. They don’t focus on the balls, they don’t focus on their movements. They unfocus. A learned state of consciousness.

Other example: karate. During his first karate classes, Stowe couldn’t even “see” what his sensei was doing. Like magic, because so different. Learning to see. Also, shortening the delay, the dollar bill trick. People can’t catch it. But if you do martial arts, you can — you’ve trained your brain to do something you couldn’t do before. A different state of consciousness. *steph-note: I’m not sure I’d call these things “different states of consciousness”.* Now, when Stowe sees karate, he knows the moves they’re making, he *can see*.

A lot of people have caracterised the things that happen to us in a negative way. Over-stimulation is driving us nuts. Stowe thinks we’re learning to accommodate a new world and cope with it. Also doesn’t agree with the “scarcity of attention” economy. (Davenport and Beck.) Another failed metaphor. Treating aspects of human cognition in economic or industrial terms fails miserably.

Psychology of Attention: we actually don’t know much about attention. It doesn’t reside in one place in your brain. It’s all over the place. An emergent property of a bunch of stuff that goes on in your brain. Conventional wisdom about attention is probably wrong. Steer clear of advice of best-selling business authors about what we should do with our attention.

We have witnessed a shift in the way we perceive media: not rival anymore. We used to turn on the radio and just listen. Later, became a background. TV too. People who have the TV on all day, or while they play a video game or listen to music (Stowe is anti-TV). Talking during the movies.

Flow media. We’re getting used to having a bunch of things going on at the same time (IM windows, skype calls, etc.)

ADD: inability to focus, hyperactive. Invented disease. Treated (paradoxically) with stimulants. Maybe kids shouldn’t sit still (over-diagnosing and medicating). Stowe doesn’t think we’re creating a toxic environment for our children, but the school system has not snapped into the 21st century.

Stowe strongly disagrees with Linda Stone’s Continuous Partial Attention theses. In general, CPA is a disorder, for her. Stowe thinks this kind of thinking is based on an old model of how one should deal with the world. FIFO. Stowe doesn’t believe flow is bad, it’s just a different model. It’s not about speed, it’s about remaining connected. We can’t stay head down for hours or days at a stretch when important events might be occurring that require immediate response.

The world is more like an ER than a supermarket checkout. Reverting to pre-agricultural consciousness. Hunter awareness. Scanning the savannah.

The war on flow (*steph-note: not sure I’d call this flow, again… agree with the concepts exposed here but the “label” flow bugs me*). Remaining connected is not a disease, but a new ethos, a new set of beliefs. Time as a shared space, and psychology is adapting to that. Conflicts with industrial norms: maybe the tribe is more important.

The Buddylist is the centre of the universe. Made greater by the sum of our connections. Flow is generational. The younger you are, the more likely you are to be doing 16 things at once. *steph-note: I must be rancid old-school, because I still think there is value on being able to concentrate/focus on one single thing during a stretch of time.*

If you expose kids to more language, they tend to be smarter. We’re training our neurones.

Why call it Flow? *steph-note: that’s the bit I’m curious about*

CM’s notion of flow: “being in the zone”. He’s opposed to the stuff Stowe is talking about *steph-note: not surprised, incompatible to me.* cf. definition from wikipedia. Usually not a solitary activity *steph-note: surprised… what about meditation? that’s an obvious example of flow.*

*steph-note: Stowe says time slows down when you’re in the zone, you can see the tennis ball. But I’m not sure that’s the main characteristic, I think: that’s because you learnt to see. In flow, time passes fast.*

Social applications (Stowe’s business): social networks are how we discover meaning, belonging and insight on the world. Traffic flow is the primary dynamic of all future social apps. Tools which will allow us to unfocus and concentrate on sociality.

Pushing Dunbar’s constant. *steph-note: cf. Stefana Broadbent at LIFT… our tools allow us to manage more relationships* Can you ‘know’ and ‘care’ about more than 150 people? What is the limit with these tools?

How do we use time? a way of sharing something. **Productivity is second to connectivity.** *steph-note: perfectly agreed.* Important stuff will find its way to you many times. You can miss things (not that important to be a slave to every e-mail, every RSS feed), but your network won’t, and things will get back to you.

Flow is a state of mind. Flow is a verb.

Discussion: Stowe says we still need to focus (*steph-note: phew!*), but it’s a question of degree. It’s about how we do a lot of things which don’t necessarily *require* full focus. Change from “head down with occasional coffee breaks” to “long coffee break with a few focused interruptions”.

Home page of Dogster: web designers like Ted hate it (it’s a mess) but the dog people love it — they just click on the dogs.

People copy-paste and personalise their cat/dog pages.

Forums: not as good as the best forums out there, but made to reflect the interests of people using the site. 5000 forum postings a day. People can organise events. Groups. Looks kinda crappy but the users don’t care.

– pick partners wisely, you’ll be married for 2-10 years. Need to talk about stuff like having kids with your partners! Partnership failures sink young businesses. *steph-note: eek! other points on slide but didn’t get them.*
– bootstrapping is good, keeping expenses manageable means you live longer, less financial constraints means more control.
– customer service is everything, from day one. Answer every e-mail, IM, phone call, resolve every problem. Without happy customers your site is just a pile of fancy server code. It’s free market research!
– develop within your impact horizon — your product must have an impact on your community within this time frame. For Catster/Dogster: 1st year, 3-4 weeks; 2nd year: 6-8 weeks; 3rd year: 2-3 months; 4th year: 2-3 months, ideally 1 month. Can’t guess that much in advance. 10 one-month features instead of 2 six-month features. More chance of one being popular.
– how do you make your money? Sponsors and direct ad buys (really hard! integrated ad campaigns); ad networks, premium memberships, virtual gifts. Bring in advertisers by encouraging them to be part of the community. They write up their stuff (less marketing goop). If you have to revert to advertising, it kind of means people aren’t that interested in the community. Ted would like to get ads and sponsors off the site altogether.

Paying members: more to be “part of the club” rather than have more features.

Circle of trust: Dogster, Community, Advertisers. Picky with advertisers. Introduce the advertiser to the community.

To be human is to be happier. No species has such a capacity to be happy (and unhappy!) as humans.

Has been helping make people happier at work.

Chief Happiness Officer

What is happiness? Let’s [ask Google](http://www.google.com/search?q=%22happiness+is%22).

Happiness is the most important thing in life. 50% genetic (cf. twin studies). We have control over the other half. Pick something you really want. Ask “why?” a few times, and you’ll end up with “because that makes me happy”.

This proves we are here to be happy. Everything we want is because in some way, it will make us happy. Happiness is the most basic “why”.

Happiness is really easy. Epicurus: all you need to be happy is easy to get. Friendship, contemplation…

Martin Seligman: Happiness can be learned. Founder of positive psychology.

Happiness is…

– not eternal (there will be bad days)
– your responsibility
– your choice (happiness does not depend on what happens to us… completely — it’s more about how we react to what happens to us, and what we choose to do about it)

Myths about happiness:

– happy people are selfish — not so, happy people care more about others
– happy people are complacent — nope, it feels good to do good
– happiness is the absence of problems — nope, happy people in the world are not those who have no problems; Epicurus “The wise man is still happy amidst his torments”.

What makes us happy?

1. Friends, family and marriage — Love, actually.
2. Meaningful, enjoyable work
3. Living a good life, according to values that make sense to you.

Biggest threats to happiness:

– TV
– consumerism

These are links, because TV drives a lot of the consumerism. Introduction of TV in Bhutan in the 90s. Life satisfaction fell, suicide and depression rates climbed, clothing changed to what teenagers wear in the US. The news is not good on TV.

Guess where we spend most of our time: in front of TV and in the jobs that give us the money to support the consumerism.

Scary thing: average British working parent spends 19 minutes per day with kids.

We tend to not know what makes us happy. “I’ll be happy when…” We are goalaholics. Book: Goal-Free Living. Start by being happy, instead of “being happy when”.

The dangers of seeking happiness: two major things can go wrong.

1. Emptiness

Nothing to strive for, suddenly life is all too easy. If I’m not happy there must be something wrong with me. One area of research has really been revolutionized by happiness: economics. They should run Britain based on making the British has happy as possible, rather than growth. In Bhutan: growth of national happiness. Denmark: happiest country on earth. There is a correlation between GNP and happiness, but… USA/Puerto Rico: same happiness, different GNP.

2. Subversiveness

Happy people are the greatest danger to some of the structures that are holding us back. If you’re really happy, you don’t give a sh*t. You don’t fall for scare politics. *steph-note: yes! yes!* You don’t fall for consumerism either (“you’ll be happier if you drive this SUV”). You don’t fall for the corporate crap either, or the self-help, the cults and the gurus, religion…

Simple things you can do to be happier:

– gratitude visit
– write down three good things about your day today
– throw out your TV

Book: “Dragons of Eden” speculations about human intelligence. Knocking down theories one by one. We aren’t actually that unique.

Soul: huge topic, since days of old. Weighing the soul. (Weigh the person at time of death: 21 grammes. Probably water vapour, but still…)

100 bio neurons in the human brain. But we can’t say what the number of links on the web is.

Definition of soul that Jeremy likes: “the story we tell ourselves”. Right hemisphere. Introverted consciousness: thinking about *who we are*. Maybe this is what makes us human.

Language doesn’t make us unique. Naming things in the world gives us a certain kind of power. Singing the world into existence. Naming the demon to control it.

JK’s blog: [Adactio](http://adactio.com) — then, on Flickr, del.icio.us, upcoming.org => fragmentation (not a feeling JK likes *steph-note: I don’t like it either!*). Created http://elsewhere.adactio.com to collect all these pieces of himself in one place (a bit geeky…)

Narrative. Telling the story of oneself to the world — and to oneself (introspection). Blogs posts, tweets, songs, photos, links… All these elements have timestamps. RSS. Lifestream! There is a blog about lifestreams *steph-note: URL, anybody?* Jaiku pretty good to pull all these things together.

But RSS and lifestreams are short-term. How do we get a long-term narrative? Check out [http://infovore.org/talks/](http://infovore.org/talks/).

People discarding archives: shame! Denying your past in a way. *steph-note: I agree, hate that too. Who I am in the present is the result of my past.*

We are attached to physical objects (cars, computers, mobile phones…).

Gaming is an important part of narrative (playing…).

Social networks are all walled gardens. They give access to data, but not to the relationships. Necessary to recreate all my relationships when I sign up to a new social network.

*steph-note: related post of mine is [Please Make Holes in My Buckets!](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/02/13/please-make-holes-in-my-buckets/)*

How can we tackle this? the rel attribute, particularly when used to describe relationships to anchors. XFN microformat.

*steph-note: problem is that the relationships are public, seems to me. related post of mine is [Groups, Groupings and Taming My Buddy List](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/05/04/groups-groupings-and-taming-my-buddy-list-and-twitter/)*

*steph-note: time for my talk is coming up, not very concentrated on the end of this one I’m afraid…*

The gift economy is personal, whereas markets are anonymous *steph-note: Cluetrain says they are somewhat personal, though…* Gift economy has organised the scientific community. Very good at exchanging information, whereas the money/market economy is better at exchanging things. The gift economy is entirely based on relationships (relationships/emotions).

Roszak: Person/Planet — 1979 (if the planet is in crisis, the people are in crisis too). Cost-benefit vs. common sense in dealing with climate issues.

Being human means cherishing some of the irrational/intuitive/emotional stuff which machines are not capable of. Also, humans are not things. “We are like flows of water and fire.” 1.5 tons of matter goes through us every year. 98% of the atoms in our body are replaced every year. “How can the potatos I had for dinner remember my childhood?”

We are like digital media, and yet we build a world of things. *steph-note: I don’t get this “we’re like digital media” thing.* We’re misfits, we don’t look like our civilisation.

If we want to get sex, we need to save the world. A guide to saving the world and getting laid.

Civilisation 2.0 — expansion of the idea of Web 2.0. We are now at a changing point in the development of human society. Moving towards solar energy, new&old social order (P2P, bottom-up, no HQ), become nomads again.

We need to go with the flow instead of trying to stop it.

Civilisation 1.0: depots, headquarters, solid objects and things.

Civilisation 2.0: P2P, flow, links (something that started last year, 2006, when we understood the climate crisis and the importance of the internet)

Civilisation 0.5: 1.000.000 years ago (fire)

Let’s use the tools of Web 2.0 to facilitate the creation of Civilisation 2.0